Magnussoft has published an update concerning Zeta. They announced SAMBA has reached beta status, while also announcing a (much needed) multi-protocol instant messaging application, which supports GoogleTalk, Jabber, AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, and MSN.

You are very possibly seeing the performance degradation due to the use of SVG tracker (note the previous discussions about SVG vs. HVIF for icons) - OR, you are possibly experiencing one of the problems I saw with the Radeon driver (assuming your friend's machine is using a Radeon card) - it doesn't seem behave well on Zeta for some reason.